Establishing a performance baseline

Introduction A performance baseline is a vital part of you system documentation. A baseline should be established immediately after a new system has entered production, and should be repeated with regular intervals. That way you can see how your system performs over time and make informed decisions about when a system will have to be …

Customizing pinned shortcuts on the Taskbar for Windows Server 2008 R2

OK, this is one way. I am sure there are several others. Can anyone say convoluted…? (This is mainly intended for use on Remote Desktop Servers.) Create a test user. My user is named Bob in this example. Log on as Bob and pin the shortcuts you want on the Taskbar, and remove the ones …

Automatic Updates Client command line parameters

The Automatic Updates Client Utility (wuauclt.exe) supports a few command line parameters. Some of them are documented, others not. Here are the ones I have found: Parameter Explanation /detectnow Run a detection cycle /a /resetauthorization Resets the WSUS cookie. (If used together with /detectnow; /resetauthorization must be entered before /detectnow.) /r /ReportNow Sends all queued …

Some Windows Server 2008 R2 Failover Cluster Notes

You should format you shared disks with NTFS before you form you cluster. If not the disks will not be eligible as witness disks. (NTFS is a requirement for a disk witness.) Do not assign a drive letter or mount point to your witness disk. (Disks used e.g. for a clustered file server needs a …

Getting volume data with PowerShell

It has always irritated me that I cannot export data from the disk management snap-in in Windows. Take this example from an Exchange server: It would be very nice to be able to export this data to a CSV to create a quick storage report. Unfortunately you can’t. But with PowerShell you can! This command …

Enabling Windows Search on Windows Server 2008 R2

As with Windows Server 2008, Windows Search is included as part of the OS and can be installed through Server Manager or PowerShell. Unfortunately it is located in a not quite intuitive place… To enable Windows Search on Windows Server 2008 R2 you must start the Add Roles wizard and then select File Services Role, …

Some Windows Virtual PC Notes

Press the DEL key to enter the VM BIOS If you can’t install the Virtual PC Integration Components on Windows XP and you get a 1603 error in the log file; delete the c:windowssystem32driverswdf01000.sys and retry the install. Press SHIFT+ESC while the VM is starting to view the console instead of just the progress bar. …

Morgan’s list of great (free) applications and utilities

So I thought I would put together a list of the stuff I use. Mostly as sort of a memo to myself, but if anyone finds this useful, so much the better. Name Description Audacity Sound file editing Paint.NET Image editing HashCheck Checksum verification/creation MyDefrag Defragmentation VirtualDub Video edition Foxit Reader PDF Reader/PDF Ifilter 7-Zip …